MARXIST-POSTGRUNGE

boy george’s book outing gavin came out in the uk in april 1995 and gavin denied it in rolling stone in april 1996, i’m not sure if he said anything before then. i haven’t read the text, but the facts as they stand seem to be that gavin dated marilyn (peter robinson) in the early eighties, i think in london. this comes out in 1995, gavin denies it, gavin and gwen get married in 2002. in 2003, marilyn puts out a single about gavin, the cover a photo of them together from that period. in 2009, i think, marilyn tells the press their relationship was a 5 year relationship. in 2010 gavin confirms for the first time that he had a relationship with marilyn, which he describes as an event that happened one time, but did not deny lasted five years. actually what he said was, “you have to know what you like, and i know what i like.” which lol. ok! i feel like fuckboys have ways of being repressed that go unappreciated. that’s just my opinion that no one asked for.

i don’t know if we know exactly when that photo dates to, but gavin says he was 17 in that relationship, which would place it in the neighborhood of 1982. (they’re like 3 years apart - as far as i can tell their relative ages were not an issue for him and have not been the subject of scandal.) (they are both scorpios.) it’s not relevant that courtney was in liverpool in 1982, but i think courtney’s time in liverpool will someday reveal itself again to be important in some way, so i am mentioning it now so i can return to this when i am proven right.

in 2015 gwen and gavin announced their splitting, and marilyn told a tabloid gavin had recently called him to vent or rave about his marriage and to blame him for its instability— for all the outing to tabloids and so on. marilyn sort of said that gwen had never been able to get over gavin’s bisexual past, which had been known to her but as extant but deniable—or maybe like, knowable but deniable—for the whole of their relationship, from the start. and boy do i believe that. it was a thing that existed by the fact of having been spoken but which had been negated by the act of being denied. marilyn said that gwen could never get over it and let me tell you i believe that is extremely plausible lol. it sounds extremely true that gwen could not cohere or simply deal with the idea of her maybe bisexual husband lol.

i feel like marilyn was trying to say two things, first that gavin was repressed and maybe just regular closeted lol and second that gavin’s habitual lying (about all things) made gwen paranoid to begin with, and made their relationship structurally unsound.

first of all do we believe this call took place? don’t care, not relevant. takeaway is the same. (additionally, we should heed this scorpio’s scorpio wisdom in general.)

you have to understand that the reason this is interesting to me—actually extremely important to me—actually maybe the most important imaginable thing to me personally—is because this is the whole entire substance of my beloved evil femcel shadow self document no doubt - return of saturn (2000). the way i often kind of describe this album is as a series of desires which are basically evil but which you can easily find yourself desiring if you’re not careful—by you i mean me and by if you’re not careful i mean if you don’t exercise historical agency in some sense or in some other sense if you don’t recognize that the price of a desire (the desire itself, not even getting the thing!) is freedom, where freedom isn’t even really just your own freedom, but is total systemic agency. another way i look at return of saturn is that it’s gwen speaking into truth a series of things that are either plainly false already or are proven false in the course of gwen arguing them. so here we have a third way of understanding return of saturn, which is as a kind of structural biphobia lmfao. i’m extremely excited by this—we have so many albums about how you can understand people relating to people through basically a gay way. that’s almost every album ever. you can do that with almost every album, especially here. but how many structurally biphobic albums are there. almost none. that’s that real gwen stefani advantage. because you can also just read return of saturn on a very surface level with the understanding that gwen is a walking sex panic. which we all know to be true!

i wanted to take a second to note something i recalled gwen having said about seeing red flags in return of saturn—sure, i guess, whatever, i mean i guess—but when i found it it was in fact promotion for the single “red flag,” from her 2016 divorce rollout record, so, sure, lol. that’s hers to do and what we love from a woman and i definitely need to listen to her divorce rollout record. genuinely i can’t wait for lana del rey to get to be 50 i bet she’s gonna have some crazy shit for us.

on courtney, well, i don’t think it’s nothing that she was with him when he was “dealing” with being outed —and i am certain she found this edifying or at least very interesting! what i would really love to hear is courtney’s analysis, in light of this, of return of saturn. i need the courtney love lacanian return of saturn read. i bet she would also think about sophie muller, david lachapelle. courtney love in my opinion has been almost unreasonably kind to gwen, to fruitful ends (hollaback girl)! i’m with gwen on one thing, that courtney could have seen that gwen wasn’t a cheerleader archetype, and i don’t think courtney thought much of it at all, but it is sort of interesting how that went like: courtney calls herself a school stoner to gwen’s cheerleader, a type of typology that isn’t even really native to courtney love, and gwen said, i take that typology extremely seriously, it is native to me, but i am not, you know, that type (hollaback girl). (wrote myself into having to say “native to gwen stefani” and i guess i will stand by it.) i know courtney wasn’t thinking but i also think she is very capable of this kind of generative discourse. it worked on gwen; it worked differently on lana, who is a sensitive and honest listener; kim gordon is too cruel and not smart enough to ever be alive dialectically; with kat i think she’s maybe just too much the hole running through.

what hellenistic and traditional astrologers have pointed out is that saturn’s transit has actually always marked, and thence signified, a complete cycle of life. from this you can understand the significations of saturn and its planets (capricorn and aquarius), saturn is both the edge of the planetary visible (last planet) and the mark of a completed lifespan (death), planet of boundaries, limits, and the inflexible structure of the universe. saturn is also the conceptual ruler of time in general.

(terms “hellenistic” and “traditional” describe astrologers who look at the origins of western astrology from babylonian to european and islamic medieval systems by revisiting known texts, translating lesser known texts, and employing other kinds of history. these are schools of astrology that really developed after the 60s, after the dominance of spiritualism, jungian, humanistic and psychological schools.)

so you can see what gwen is doing, i am personally concerned about myself as a reproducing subject, and saturn is a symbol that directs me to assess myself in relation to ideas i have about female life cycle and so on, but what’s great about this record is that it makes so obviously clear that panic over reproductive self discipline and sexual futurity is profoundly limiting, repressive, and actually quite selfish, and that’s what’s great about saturn. it’s not a limit which structures the universe, it’s not something that stops you, it’s a structure you bump into; “limits” are the things you hit and bounce off of when you’re in motion, eg a negation of your motion which transforms your motion.

—“how’d i get so faithful to my freedom? a selfish kind of life.” i was watching the video, as i do, and my favorite part (this is my favorite music video) is the light on the wall behind gwen and adrian, a sculpture of old ortho style circular birth control as like dancing meter lights on a soundboard, “faithful to my freedom” written on it. sophie muller is known for kind of surrealist chamber film videos, where she sets musicians in really constructed and sometimes disoriented domestic spaces and draws performances of intimacy out of them, but never ethnographically at all. the only filmmakers she has talked about much as influences are maya deren and jean cocteau. one of my favorite non gwen sophie muller videos is “say it ain’t so,” and i was watching that too, and suddenly i was like, oh no, this is kind of jeanne dielman for men. (sounds actually like something rivers cuomo might have requested lol.) anyway. i think it’s VERY interesting that (i believe) muller only worked with courtney once (“miss world”), even though, as i recall, miss world was the first live through this video. and it’s totally perfect—the only better courtney love video is malibu—and muller does an incredible job using courtney’s language in her language. i have more thoughts on that. but with gwen, i think muller’s first video might have been “don’t speak” (really is still an amazing video, sophie muller is an insanely underrated director), after that gwen has rarely ever worked with anyone else.